Teach Your Dog to Read?

    • Gold Top Dog

    Teach Your Dog to Read?

    Anyone else have this book? Anyone else doing this with your dog? I picked this up over the weekend and started doing it with Max. So far, i've only taught the first two words in the book, down and sit (the book suggests teaching down first, rather than sit, like is typically taught first).
    Anyway, we're enjoying it so far. Max picked up the words pretty fast, and he was able to discriminate between the two without much work. When I put the two together, he only errored once. He does sometimes swipe at the cards, because I taught him to do that before to discriminate between the letters of his name, but when he's not over excited, he does it correctly.
    Max also used to jump over the gate to the kitchen repeatedly, almost anytime I went into the kitchen or the bathroom, both on the other side of the gate. It was annoying, because I could never go to the bathroom or cook something without him up my butt. One of my goals with the book was to teach him to read sit, and be able to use that to reduce his jumping over the gate. So far, we're sucessful. He used to jump every time I went to the other side of the gate, today he only jumped twice. I taped a sit card to the gate. About half the time he walks up, reads the card, and sits on his, the other half I am prompting him to read it, but he's doing it. I don't expect it to eliminate the jumping 100% yet, but i'm hopeful that we can get there. And honestly, I really had no other ideas on it, and any reduction of the jumping is great in my opinion.
    • Silver
    no. way.

    that is so cool.

    The name of the book is "teaching your dog to read"?

    I'm on it. That's so rad.
    • Gold Top Dog
    ohwww....

    I'm so going to buy that book![sm=dance.gif]
    • Gold Top Dog
    This was my first reaction when I read the title to this thread=[sm=rotfl.gif] I mean, should I start with phonics or phonemic awareness??? Maybe just the alphabet and sounds.

    But it sounds kind of cool...after I read the entire post! good idea! If it works. Keep us posted!
    • Gold Top Dog
    C'mon, guys....the reason this works is that dogs can easily recognize shapes (letters are shapes) and they notice contrast really well, too (black "shapes" on white paper).  The cards, with their distinguishable shapes simply become "cues" to perform a behavior.
    I agree that this is a really neat set of cues to teach, though. 
    • Gold Top Dog
    [sm=rofl.gif] @ everyone who thought it was something different.
    Max is doing well with it, but I still need to print him some new words. I posted the sit sign on the gate, which is still working pretty well. It's really reduced the jumping. We haven't done anything else though, because Max got sick for a few days, he's been in daycare and too tired at night to work,  and I can't take him upstairs to where the printers have been moved if Millie is in there. I really, really need to go print some new words. The book suggests stand as the third lesson, but I think we're going do wave. I taught him to swipe at pieces of paper before(spelling his name), so now he's just defaulting to that. I think once we get it on command, it'll extinguish unwanted pawing.
    I believe the book is called, "Teach Your Dog to Read." I can't remember the author, but it's sitting on the floor in the other room. I think it cost about $10 regular price, although I have the barnes and noble discount card.
    Your dog has to have voice commands, or hand signals in order to do it, although I think it would probably work better with transferring voice to cards, rather than hand signals to cards, as attending to multiple visual stimuli is probably more difficult. I haven't yet done a hand signal to card transfer, but I will be doing that from now on, as our work on hand signals to verbal transfers haven't been entirely sucessful.
    • Gold Top Dog
    Interestingly enough, I think we got wave transferred on the first trial. I just tried holding up the card and seeing if he would do it, but for once he didn't try to paw it. When I said wave, I think it was only coincidence that he did it then, because when I tried later on to use only the voice command for wave, he sat and looked at me like I was a lunatic until I showed him the card, then he did it right away again. 
    • Gold Top Dog
    Thanks for the recommendation!  I just reserved it at the library (old habit - I like to test drive them before I buy them).  My Aussie, Ruby, has such an inquisitive mind that I'll bet she catches on to this one easily. Christi
    • Gold Top Dog
    Cool. I  hope you like it as much as I do. I doubt you'll need to buy it after checking it out at the library, because after you get the teaching technique down, there's not much else to it. Although, it might be useful to copy the suggested order of teaching. While I don't want to give away the whole book and possibly take away some sales of the book, it's basically show the card and say the word three times for three trials, then do an immediate trial without saying the word. There are of course some other little things in the book that are very useful to know, to make sure the dog is actually discriminating between the words, preteaching tips, etc.